We don't need your petulance, Mr Quick

Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick of the Met can certainly give it - as MPs realised when his men rifled through Damian Green's Commons offices without so much as a search warrant.

Taking it is another matter, however. After The Mail on Sunday reported that Quick's wife was running a classic car hire business from his home, outraged innocence filled his throbbing chest.

I am no Sherlock Holmes. But I only needed to glance at the story to guess it had come from a disgruntled officer who wondered whether it was safe or wise for the head of his anti-terrorist division to allow his home address to be posted on the net.

Not so Mr Quick. In a raging outburst he had to apologise for yesterday, he cried that the "Tory machinery and their press friends" were mobilising against his investigation "in a wholly corrupt way". He was, he sighed, "very disappointed in the country I am living in".

The petulance was matched only by the ignorance. The Met, Government ministers and the Home Office civil service still don't get it. They still see themselves as victims of a sinister conspiracy rather than guilty men.

Allow me to put them straight. The harassing of an opposition MP and his family for the spurious "crime" of holding the Government to account certainly infuriated the Tory press. But my colleagues at the liberal Observer and I were equally furious. So too was the political editor of the Left-wing New Statesman, along with all the Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs who condemned the Met's abuse of the privileges of Parliament.

We are not part of a Conservative plot. We do not receive instructions from the "Tory machine" - if truth be told we barely know the names of David Cameron's functionaries at Conservative HQ, and would pay no heed to them if we did.

We merely believe that the House of Commons may be a poor thing but it is the best our democracy has got. If the police use a trumped-up charge to arrest an MP who has not endangered national security or acted corruptly, we will defend that MP regardless of his politics.

Mr Quick may be "disappointed in the country we are living in". Your behaviour, Mr Quick, has made a lot of others feel the same way.